jeffersonpowers
I think the presence of a gamemaster in RPGs makes it a lot easier to handle edge cases and ideas that might be outside the rules as written. But I also think an RPG is a very different experience to a heat-to-head or even multiplayer miniatures game. With a head-to-head game, even a “friendly” one, you need most if not all of the rules to be spelled out to a reasonable degree since ostensibly the goal is to win the battle rather than just move the story forward. The rules don’t need to be nearly as granular if you have an impartial referee to parse them and make judgement calls, like you do in an RPG.
Genre-specific rules are sometimes important. Just as an example, one of the settings I’m trying to find a good rules set for is Aliens, specifically the second film. This would need rules for things like autofire and ammo counting, since running out of ammo was one of the points of tension in the film. Also, probably some kind of mechanic for stress as the characters start to lose their cool. And the Aliens would need fairly robust stealth rules (“They’re coming out of the walls!”), but also probably rules for multi-figure units since their main advantage in the film is their numbers.
Another genre I’m looking at is Batman, which wouldn’t require anywhere near the same granularity with regard to firearms, but would need very different movement rules to reflect all the swinging around on grappling hooks and the like, rules that would likely be wildly different in Aliens. Would it be possible to create one system to accommodate both genres? Probably, but the more “generic” you try to be with the rules, the more rules you need to cover all the different possibilities. It seems like it might be better to have a dedicated Aliens game that’s designed for only the things that happen in that genre, a Batman game to handle the uniquely Batman stuff, and so on.
On the other hand, a Batman vs. Aliens game would be cool, and not entirely unprecedented… 😉
